Inhaltsstrategie*
Die Inhaltsstrategie umfasst die gezielte Planung, Produktion, Verbreitung, Steuerung aller Inhalte; http://Inhaltsstrategie.de
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Internet Access: a Human Right?
A UN report declared Internet access a human right last summer: Cerf argues why it’s not; http://eicker.at/InternetHumanRight
Gerrit Eicker
Mobile and Cloud Platform Wars
IDC: 2012 will be the year of mobile and cloud platform wars as IT vendors vie for leadership; http://eicker.at/MobileCloudWars
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Gerrit Eicker
IDC: “One year ago, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that the IT industry’s next dominant platform, built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies, would begin its transition into the mainstream. Today, spending on these technologies is growing at about 18% per year and is expected to account for at least 80% of IT spending growth between now and 2020. With future market revenues at stake, IDC predicts that 2012 will be marked by some of the first high-stakes battles as companies seek to position themselves for leadership in these critical and fast-growing technology areas. … Overall, IDC predicts that worldwide IT spending will grow 6.9% year over year to $1.8 trillion in 2012. As much as 20% of this total spending will be driven by the technologies that are reshaping the IT industry – smartphones, media tablets, mobile networks, social networking, and big data analytics. … 2012 will also be the Year of Mobile Ascendency as mobile devices (smartphones and media tablets) surpass PCs in both shipments and spending and mobile apps, with 85 billion downloads, generate more revenue than the mainframe market. The mobility market will see heated competition in 2012 as Microsoft joins the crucial battle for dominance in the mobile operating system (OS) market and the Kindle Fire challenges the iPad in the media tablet market. … Competition will also characterize the world of cloud services in 2012 as the strategic focus shifts from building infrastructure to the creation of application platforms and ecosystems. Here the battle for enterprise platform dominance is just getting underway with established players like IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle facing serious challenges from Amazon, Google, Salesforce.com, and VMware. … Social networking technologies – especially where they are being accelerated by mobile technologies – will be recognized as a mandatory component in every major enterprise IT vendors’ strategy. As a result, IDC expects a number of major IT vendors to make ‘statement’ acquisitions in social business while others continue to expand their community platforms. … Finally, Big Data will earn its place as the next ‘must have’ competency in 2012 as the volume of digital content grows to 2.7 zettabytes (ZB), up 48% from 2011. Over 90% of this information will be unstructured (e.g., images, videos, MP3 files, and files based on social media and Web-enabled workloads) – full of rich information, but challenging to understand and analyze. … The number of intelligent, communicating devices on the network will outnumber ‘traditional computing’ devices by almost 2 to 1 within next 24 months, changing the way we think – and interact – with each other and devices on the network.“
Gerrit Eicker
IT: Cloud, Social, Mobile, Information
Gartner: Cloud, social, mobile and information combine to transform the IT landscape in 2012; http://eicker.at/IT2012
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Gerrit Eicker
Gartner: “Four IT forces, IT consumerization and new technology styles are forcing IT organizations to see they can’t control IT spending. They must actively manage technology investments inside and outside IT. … This Predicts 2012 special report highlights how the control of technology and technology-driven decisions is shifting out of the hands of IT organizations. New forces that are not easily controlled by IT are pushing themselves to the forefront of IT spending. Specifically, the forces of cloud computing, social media and social networking, mobility and information management are all evolving at a rapid pace. … These technological evolutions in the workplace are largely happening despite the controls IT normally places on the use of technologies. The cloud offers new delivery styles and options that are industrialized in a value chain that renders on-premises IT systems and expertise as only part of the overall delivery of IT capabilities to the company. Social computing is allowing collaboration, and a shift of behavioral patterns of users and the communities in which they work. Mobility offers new access channels to applications and data, and at the same time provides end users with a wide variety of device choices. The combination of cloud, social computing and mobility can be used to increase geographic diversity and raise the productivity of virtual teams. Users expect to get access to personal, work, business applications and data from any device, anytime and anywhere. – Finally, the concept of ‘big data’ is beginning to forever alter the relationship of technology to information consumption, as data coming from multiple federated sources and in structured and unstructured forms must now be analyzed using new methodologies foreign to many IT departments. … As the relationship between ‘technology means’ and ‘technology outcomes’ becomes ever clearer, stakeholders of all kinds are gaining a sharper understanding of how technology decisions will impact the business, and are raising the bar in terms of expectations for success.”
Gerrit Eicker
Internetrecht 2011
17. Auflage des Standardwerks Internetrecht (PDF) von Prof. Dr. Hoeren erschienen; http://eicker.at/Internetrecht2011
Gerrit Eicker
Google Transparency Report
How do governments affect access to information? Google’s Transparency Report 2011; http://eicker.at/GoogleTransparencyReport
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “How do governments affect access to information on the Internet? To help shed some light on that very question, last year we launched an online, interactive Transparency Report. All too often, policy that affects how information flows on the Internet is created in the absence of empirical data. But by showing traffic patterns and disruptions to our services, and by sharing how many government requests for content removal and user data we receive from around the world, we hope to offer up some metrics to contribute to a public conversation about the laws that influence how people communicate online. – Today we’re updating the Government Requests tool with numbers for requests that we received from January to June 2011. For the first time, we’re not only disclosing the number of requests for user data, but we’re showing the number of users or accounts that are specified in those requests too. … We believe that providing this level of detail highlights the need to modernize laws like the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which regulates government access to user information and was written 25 years ago – long before the average person had ever heard of email.”
Google: “Transparency is a core value at Google. As a company we feel it is our responsibility to ensure that we maximize transparency around the flow of information related to our tools and services. We believe that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual. – We’ve created Government Requests to show the number of government inquiries for information about users and requests to remove content from our services. We hope this step toward greater transparency will help in ongoing discussions about the appropriate scope and authority of government requests. – Our interactive Traffic graphs provide information about traffic to Google services around the world. Each graph shows historic traffic patterns for a geographic region and service. By illustrating outages, this tool visualizes disruptions in the free flow of information, whether it’s a government blocking information or a cable being cut. We hope this raw data will help facilitate studies about service outages and disruptions.”
GigaOM: “Any lingering fantasies of the web as a no-man’s land where content is free from the restraints of geographical boundaries probably should be put to rest. Google Tuesday morning released a treasure trove of data relating to content-takedown requests, and the numbers speak for themselves: requests are up worldwide and Google complies with the majority of them. … When it comes to requests for user data, all that Google and companies of its ilk really can do is ensure that requests are within the bounds of the law and notify users of requests for their data. But in the United States, at least, the laws regarding web-user data are still fairly lax and don’t require a search warrant in many instances. It’s yet another example of the web and the law not being anywhere near on the same page. – It’s easy to poke them for being too willing to bend to the wills of government officials and authorities, but web companies can’t flaunt the laws of the countries in which they want to operate, either. Otherwise, as separate Google data illustrates, the lights might go out on their services in those countries.”
RWW: “Google has updated its Government Requests tool with data from the first half of this year. For the first time, the report discloses the number of users or accounts specified, not just the number of requests. Google also made the raw data behind government requests available to the public. … Electronic communications have changed a bit since 1986. They form a ubiquitous, always-on fabric of our lives now. Fortunately, Google isn’t any happier with the status quo than privacy-aware users are. It’s among a number of major Web companies pushing for better laws. And Google and other data-mining companies take their roles in public policy seriously. Both Google and Facebook’s lobbying efforts broke records this year.”
TC: “Google Declines To Remove Police Brutality Videos, Still Complies With 63% Of Gov’t Takedown Requests – US Government requests for user data jumped, however: 5950 versus 4287 during the same period in 2010, asking for information on 11,057 users. 93% of these were complied with, ‘fully or partially.’ So while they’re making something of a stand on removing data, they don’t seem to have any trouble giving it out.”
Guardian: “Figures revealed for the first time show that the US demanded private information about more than 11,000 Google users between January and June this year, almost equal to the number of requests made by 25 other developed countries, including the UK and Russia. – Governments around the world requested private data about 25,440 people in the first half of this year, with 11,057 of those people in the US. – It is the first time Google has released details about how many of its users are targeted by authorities, as opposed to the number of requests made by countries.”
VB: “Notably, in the United States, Google refused to remove YouTube clips showing police brutality. In these cases in particular, we are seeing how relatively neutral platforms such as YouTube can have great social impact depending on the intentions of the person posting the content and the integrity of the content host in keeping that content online.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Infinite Digital Bookcase
Google: We designed a digital bookcase that’s an infinite 3D helix; http://eicker.at/Google3DBookcase
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “As digital designers, we often think about how to translate traditional media into a virtual space. Recently, we thought about the bookcase. What would it look like if it was designed to hold digital books? – A digital interface needs to be familiar enough to be intuitive, while simultaneously taking advantage of the lack of constraints in a virtual space. In this case, we imagined something that looks like the shelves in your living room, but is also capable of showcasing the huge number of titles available online – many more than fit on a traditional shelf. With this in mind, we designed a digital bookcase that’s an infinite 3D helix. You can spin it side-to-side and up and down with your mouse. It holds 3D models of more than 10,000 titles from Google Books. – The books are organized into 28 subjects. To choose a subject, click the subject button near the top of your screen when viewing the bookcase. The camera then flies to that subject. Clicking on a book pulls it off the shelf and brings it to the front and center of the screen. Click on the high-resolution cover and the book will open to a page with title and author information as well as a short synopsis, provided by the Google Books API. All of the visuals are rendered with WebGL, a technology in Google Chrome and other modern browsers that enables fast, hardware-accelerated 3D graphics right in the browser, without the need for a plug-in.”
TC: “I wrote a while back about the eventual necessity for the internet to become beautiful. The trouble is that the things in the world we consider beautiful in an informational context – magazine and book layouts, typography, etc. – are necessarily limited in the information they have to present. It’s this limitation, the known quantity aspect, that lets designers work effectively. – How should you design something, then, that presents effectively limitless information (say, all the world’s books) through a fairly limited medium (say, a web browser)? Google has one idea. Put them on a gigantic helix. … But is this really something people will want to navigate? Probably not. People like analogs in their digital catalogs, and this one seems a little bit too off the wall. … Anyway, it’s a fun little experiment you can try out here. Note to Mac Laptop users: be careful how you swipe or you may accidentally navigate off the page or invoke some arcane gesture.”
VB: “With tablets and eReaders offering a number of new ways to experience books, the browser has been relatively ignored. However, not a lot of people consider getting into a bubble bath with their nice glass of wine and a laptop book to wind down the day, but you never know. To that end, the virtual bookcase may not be a competitor to the Kindle, but rather to the book discovery service overall. It could also simply be a way to funnel people toward purchasing Google Books, but it’s still pretty cool.“
Gerrit Eicker
Social Business: Strategy, Measurement, Engagement
Social business: harnessing intelligence, measuring community health, moving to engagement; http://eicker.at/SocialBusiness
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Gerrit Eicker
Hinchcliffe: “As businesses begin looking strategically at big data as a way to improve their business performance, an important element of their efforts will be in the burgeoning capability of social analytics… 1. Social media has become the primary creative channel for new information. 2. Business intelligence must look at the whole ecosystem. 3. New techniques are required for social analytics as well as to handle the volumes of big data that result. – While the field is somewhat new, as social analytics has only had a real run-up the last two years, some obvious strategies have started to emerge. For now, most organizations will be trying to build basic social BI capabilities and get experience with them…
- Expertise and Reputation Tracking
- Customer Engagement and Retention
- Social Business Adoption Tracking
- Funnel Analysis
- Social Supply Chain Management
- Human Capital Management
- Compliance and Regulatory Tracking
- Brand Insight
- Operations Management
There are other ways to apply social BI but these will be the most common ones for the majority of companies building or acquiring such capabilities.”
Camargo: “Creating successful online communities is still more art than science, yet techniques and frameworks are now emerging to turn social business into a real discipline. This week we take a look at a new case study that explores metrics that can measure the intrinsic health of communities instead of looking purely at size as the defining barometer. … Conventional wisdom tells us Community Owners should rely on two key metrics to track the success of an online community: Membership (number of registered users) and participation (number of active users in a given time period). That’s well and good but what about measuring the health of the community, not just its size? … Each and every community out there will have its own particular intricacies and you organization will surely require you to adhere to its own KPIs and reporting frameworks. In our case, the content contribution pyramid-inspired reporting model was a very valuable addition to our reporting toolbox. This KPI enabled us to understand variations in context, purpose and participants within each of our communities while keeping an eye on overall growth trends.”
Hinchcliffe: “When we look back at the first decade of the 21st century, it will be obvious that a few momentous changes in the business and computing landscape occurred. Of these, one of the most profound has been a decreasing emphasis on systems of record and the move towards what are called systems of engagement. … Systems of record have matured to the point where there’s only a little strategic advantage to having your own unique capability. Instead, the discussion on strategic technology has shifted to the other 40% of what businesses in industrialized nations do: Knowledge work. … Thus, using technology to enable knowledge work as a strategic capability has sparked a growing interest in improving what are increasingly known as systems of engagement. … For enterprises, ground zero for the transition to systems of engagement in many companies often centers around any pending update of the corporate intranet. … What’s also clear about the changes taking place in businesses today is that systems of record are not going away. … New systems of engagement are now receiving considerable attention in the forms of online communities, crowdsourcing, Social CRM, open APIs, and many other means as a way to connect customers and business partners together to achieve useful outcomes with the most cost-effectiveness and largest result.“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Platform
Facebook F8 amplifies the Facebook Platform: Like, Timeline, News Feed, API; http://eicker.at/FacebookPlatform
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Gerrit Eicker
Forbes: “[T]here’s no question – Facebook remains the most ambitious, most technologically sophisticated, fastest-moving Internet company. The changes announced [at F8] were as big as anything the company has ever done – to turn Facebook into a real-time engine for seeing what your friends are doing and joining them right now… The changes are all big, but perhaps the most interesting is that Facebook is becoming a real-time communication service. … Longtime tech pundit and thinker Esther Dyson posted on Twitter today that Facebook was launching the ‘semantic Web’ without calling it that. Good, because hardly anyone ever understood what that meant. … In order to launch these real-time features for its platform, Facebook needed a way for users to access them. That’s why it launched the ticker earlier this week. … The best way to think of Facebook is as infrastructure – the social infrastructure of the Internet. Zuckerberg believes Facebook has far more to gain over the long term by reinforcing itself as a universal platform than by any other means. … Granted, it is potentially problematic for one company to own an essential piece of Net infrastructure.”
SG: “Without a doubt, [the] major keynote at f8 2011 showed Facebook to be making some major changes in the very near future. Starting with a whole new layout and set of functions they’re calling ‘Timeline‘ and moving through app enhancements that have the potential to change the way we use apps on all platforms, we’ve got a guide here for you, the Facebook user, to easily understand what you’ve got in store. This is Facebook as it will exist starting at the tail end of 2011. … There is a new class of application on Facebook now called Open Graph. This class is defined by three principles: Frictionless experiences, Realtime serendipity, and Finding patterns. The goal here is to have subject matter (games, music, video, social apps) spread to friends via friends in as enjoyable a manner as possible.”
AF: “According to Zuck[erberg]… ‘A record 500 million people used Facebook the same day. We’re connected now. The next era will be defined by the social apps that use these connections. … But there’s more to us, to our deepest conversations. You want to express the story of your life in terms of the most important and meaningful parts of your life – this is the heart of your Facebook experience.’ … Facebook has created a new class of apps to deal with the next version of open graph. Facebook’s mission is to make world more open and connected. They want you to have a more personal experience. … Now you’ll be able to eat a meal, hike a trail, and so on, and the activity shows up in the news feed. This means Facebook is adding verbs to the connections in the social graph. … GraphRank may be the new EdgeRank. What do I want to see in the news feed versus someone’s timeline? Different types of relationships work differently – work friends versus family, for example. And this is probably going to integrate the new friends lists and family categorizations.”
Guardian: “While Facebook is keen for its users to stay on the site for as long as possible, Zuckerberg has consistently emphasised that the site is a ‘distribution platform’ to other media companies. – The social network has moved to strengthen its ties with media partners in recent months as it moves closer to its hotly anticipated initial public offering. Facebook was recently valued at $66.5bn on secondary markets. Its global revenues are expected to reach $4.3bn in 2011, up from $2bn in 2010, according to the research firm eMarketer. … [Zuckerberg] wants Facebook to be the centre of your web experience. That’s the purpose of the redesign of the ‘timeline’ – the river of experiences recounted by your friends. Rather than being a river, he’s offering the chance to organise it, with the photos and videos. … The key is that he wants Facebook to become the de facto authentication mechanism of the web.”
Green, TC: “I was one of the first people to join Facebook in February of 2004, and launched one of the inaugural applications on the platform in May 2007. The new Facebook profile and Open Graph announced…, along with the launch of smart friend lists last week, is going to usher in a new era of the Facebook platform. And I believe entire industries will potentially be revolutionized by social, from travel to reviews to health to e-commerce, and of course charity. … I am confident we will see major sectors, from music to reviews to commerce, revolutionized by authentic friend-to-friend interactions. We are fortunate at Causes to have a big start in one of the largest markets around, the $300 billion giving market. It is anyone’s guess if the other major categories will go social with their current leading companies, or if entirely new ones will emerge, like Zynga in gaming. Either way, it will be a fun ride.”
RWW: “Facebook significantly scaled up the amount of information it tracks about you – and many millions of other people. The once humble status update field has been expanded to include 6 types of ‘life events.’ You now automatically share data about what you’re reading or listening to. … Here’s a quick summary of what’s changed: A new Subscribe button, allowing you to follow people you aren’t friends with, plus filter the amount of information you get from current friends. Improved friends lists – easier way to group people into lists, including via semi-automated ‘smart lists.’ A News Ticker that streams a constant flow of user updates in a sidebar (on top of your chat bar). A newspaper-like relevancy filter for your Facebook homepage. Instant sharing of what you read, listen to and watch. A new Timeline profile (a colorful history of you and your ‘life events’).”
Gerrit Eicker
Piwik*
Piwik als ernsthafte Alternative zu Google Analytics: lokal installiert und Open Source; http://eicker.at/Piwik
Gerrit Eicker 11:36 on 6. January 2012 Permalink |
UN: “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression – This report explores key trends and challenges to the right of all individuals to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds through the Internet. The Special Rapporteur underscores the unique and transformative nature of the Internet not only to enable individuals to exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression, but also a range of other human rights, and to promote the progress of society as a whole. Chapter III of the report underlines the applicability of international human rights norms and standards on the right to freedom of opinion and expression to the Internet as a communication medium, and sets out the exceptional circumstances under which the dissemination of certain types of information may be restricted. Chapters IV and V address two dimensions of Internet access respectively: (a) access to content; and (b) access to the physical and technical infrastructure required to access the Internet in the first place. More specifically, chapter IV outlines some of the ways in which States are increasingly censoring information online, namely through: arbitrary blocking or filtering of content; criminalization of legitimate expression; imposition of intermediary liability; disconnecting users from Internet access, including on the basis of intellectual property rights law; cyber-attacks; and inadequate protection of the right to privacy and data protection. Chapter V addresses the issue of universal access to the Internet. The Special Rapporteur intends to explore this topic further in his future report to the General Assembly. Chapter VI contains the Special Rapporteur’s conclusions and recommendations concerning the main subjects of the report.”
Wired: “U.N. Report Declares Internet Access a Human Right – A United Nations report said Friday that disconnecting people from the internet is a human rights violation and against international law. – The report railed against France and the United Kingdom, which have passed laws to remove accused copyright scofflaws from the internet. It also protested blocking internet access to quell political unrest… The report, by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, comes the same day an internet-monitoring firm detected that two thirds of Syria’s internet access has abruptly gone dark, in what is likely a government response to unrest in that country.”
Cerf, NYT: “Internet Access Is Not a Human Right – It is no surprise, then, that the protests have raised questions about whether Internet access is or should be a civil or human right. … In June, citing the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, a report by the United Nations’ special rapporteur went so far as to declare that the Internet had ‘become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights.’ … But that argument, however well meaning, misses a larger point: technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human right. Loosely put, it must be among the things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives, like freedom from torture or freedom of conscience. It is a mistake to place any particular technology in this exalted category, since over time we will end up valuing the wrong things. … Indeed, even the United Nations report, which was widely hailed as declaring Internet access a human right, acknowledged that the Internet was valuable as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. … While the United States has never decreed that everyone has a ‘right’ to a telephone, we have come close to this with the notion of ‘universal service’… Improving the Internet is just one means, albeit an important one, by which to improve the human condition. It must be done with an appreciation for the civil and human rights that deserve protection – without pretending that access itself is such a right.”
GigaOM: “Cerf’s position is somewhat surprising because, as even he acknowledges in his piece for the NYT, the events of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011… Cerf is also the ‘chief Internet evangelist’ at Google, so it seems a little odd he would be downplaying the need for widespread internet access and the benefits that it brings to society. … In a nutshell, Cerf’s argument seems to be that if we define Internet access itself as a right, we are placing the focus on the wrong thing. The ‘Net, he says, is just a technological tool that enables us to exercise other fundamental rights, such as the right to free speech or access to information – and rights should not be awarded to tools, but to the ends that they enable us to reach. … The Internet is a fundamental method of communication and connection, and is becoming more fundamental all the time, as we’ve seen in the Middle East and elsewhere. Seeing it as a right is an important step towards making it available to as many people as possible.”
TL: “As I noted in my earlier essay, the best universal service policy is marketplace competition. When we get the basic framework right – low taxes, property rights, contractual enforcement, anti-fraud standards, etc. – competition generally takes care of the rest. But competition often doesn’t develop – or is sometimes prohibited outright – in sectors or for networks that are declared ‘essential’ facilities or technological entitlements. … So, while I appreciate and agree with Cerf’s humorous point that ‘Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it,’ the more interesting question is this: If government would have decreed long ago that everyone had a right to a horse, would that have meant everyone actually got one? … These are the sort of questions rarely asked initially in discussions about proposals to convert technologies or networks into birthright entitlements. Eventually, however, they become inescapable problems that every entitlement system must grapple with. When we discuss the wisdom of classifying the Internet or broadband as a birthright entitlement, we should require advocates to provide us with some answers to such questions. Kudos to Vint Cerf for helping us get that conversation going in a serious way.”
TC: “So, is the internet a human right? It is our best and most effective way of achieving a universal freedom of expression, and it should be treated as such. But to enshrine it, as others have said, as a human right when it is in fact merely a powerful enabler thereof, is an unnecessary step. Laws and regulations, and things like UN guidelines, should be aimed at enshrining rights in their pure and timeless forms, not in derivative forms, however widespread and important those derivatives may be.”
TR: “It might be argued that internet access was a civil right, since it is something that people look to governments to provide as a matter of course. But even this argument is shaky, he warns. Instead we should look not to the technology, but to the technology industry, to protect human rights, and it is up to engineers to ensure universal, safe internet access. … Cerf, whose current day job is being an internet evangelist for Google, may well have a point. But based on current evidence, there’s a mixed record from the technology industry thus far, not least from Silicon Valley itself. … From a technical perspective, El Reg suspects that Cerf has it right: the internet is no more a human right than a road or telephone. But looking to a relatively amoral industry like technology to act as a human rights guardian is asking for trouble.“